In the modern communications market you now have to look at new and emerging technologies in dog years. A product, feature or service that has been around for just a few months can have a lasting impact, a few years and it’s seen as a cornerstone that many businesses can’t envision life without.
With the rate of change being accelerated to near light speed, the way in which we view business communications seemingly shifts every other day. Everything has been squeezed into a much shorter period of time, often through a necessity to keep up with external forces, so tech that has only been around for a few years feels like its been around forever.
Case and point - Microsoft Teams has gone from being an underdog in the UC & C space (before it was even called that) at the turn of the decade to being an industry staple with a daily active userbase equivalent to the entire population of the United States of America. What’s more important however is what Microsoft are doing with this growth in terms of communication capability. Teams has added a few ways of enabling voice with their own calling plans and the Operator Connect Marketplace, but voice adoption in Teams has largely been driven by Direct Routing, which lets people bring their own SBCs to enable voice on the platform.
Microsoft Teams daily active user count
But this adoption wasn’t always easy. As with pretty much all things telco, the early iterations of Direct Routing were complex to say the least, needing huge amounts of expertise and support to effectively enable. But now the creases have been ironed out, Direct Routing is forging ahead as an incredibly popular option when it comes to getting voice into Microsoft Teams. So how did the past Direct Routing become the present? Crucially, how do both of these add up to where Direct Routing is going in the future in the grand scheme of Microsoft Teams calling and integrated voice?
Going right back to the start, the rise of Direct Routing heavily relied on three main components – VoIP coming into full swing, the idea of unified communications taking shape and SBC deployment being in a place that could support scalable integrated voice communications. But just as Direct Routing was not the last option that Microsoft would offer to connect external calls, it most certainly was also not the first. There were in fact two voice options that came before Direct Routing:
Skype for Business originally stepped to the table with a decent amount of functionality, and its initial impact on business communications cannot be understated. With decent collaboration tooling and both voice and video calling it helped a lot of businesses make the transition to VoIP in the mid 2010s on top of being a part of the initial push to enable both remote and hybrid work models.
Largely, the downfall of Skype for Business could be attributed to a few things; It being in the wrong place at the wrong time, the rise of Teams and Microsoft’s need to shift users to one central platform that was tied to the Microsoft 365 ecosystem. After all, Microsoft couldn’t battle the like of Zoom, Webex and Slack from two fronts.
You could technically get a form of calling plan as a part of Skype for Business while it was still operational, but Microsoft Calling Plans were largely introduced shortly after the launch of the Microsoft Teams platform as a quick and easy way to get dialling. But there were certainly limitations, some of which still hinder the voice option to this day.
Microsoft Calling Plans had no flexibility, for both users and providers. In the early days coverage was quite limited and even though they were seen as a fairly ‘out-of-the-box’ solution they were certainly pretty barebones. And as businesses required flexibility more and more, even back then there were requirements above just a dial tone for organizations looking to get calling with Teams.
A timeline of Microsoft calling options
So now that you’re all caught up with what came before Direct Routing and the general context surrounding it (or not if you skipped, don’t worry, I won’t judge). But how did Direct Routing fare upon launch and how did it stack up to the alternatives that were being offered at the time?
In short, Direct Routing fully delivered on its promise to inject the maximum amount of flexibility available to the Microsoft Teams Phone platform and add to the calling capabilities that Teams could offer users in general. It was a way for organizations to connect their existing PBX and existing setups with Microsoft Teams in a way that suited them. Microsoft had flung open Pandora’s box, and let businesses have at it, letting them play with the entire feature set that Teams Phone had to offer, no restrictions, no limitations.
If you were asked to sum up the early days of Direct Routing into one word however, your two main choices would either be ‘Chaotic’, or ‘Complex'. Compared to the easy-to-use Calling Plan option, Direct Routing, although far superior in terms of potential functionality, was infinitely more complex to set up, provision and manage.
Direct Routing promised so much, including more features, a larger reach and lower costs, but all of that was behind a wall of complexity, where the bricks were technical implementation and the mortar was Microsoft PowerShell. It wasn’t until a certain global pandemic came along where providers and businesses alike really started to accelerate adoption and iron out the complexities. Which leads on to the next phase of Direct Routing’s lifecycle…
With further development of SBCs and the advancement of Direct Routing in both geographic reach and compatibility, more carriers were seeing the upsides of getting a direct line between their services and Teams. But as providers were racing to get solutions set up overall reliability dipped. Compliance and security were also two big barriers to adoption, which both varied from country to country and getting a Direct Routing solution spun up was still complex no matter which way you cut it.
As remote work became a necessity across the globe there was suddenly a massive demand for voice solutions that could be accessed from anywhere and Direct Routing ticked a lot of boxes for a lot of businesses. After all, effective communication was, and still is, at the centre of practically all organizations. This forced even more accelerated change that were tailored to remote work – Adaptive SBCs, enhanced security and compliance measures, better encryption, easier setup methods, more practical implementations, all made ready for those who could now not return to their offices.
Because of the pandemic, traditional on-prem communication stacks were suddenly not fit for purpose in a lot of cases and many rushed to the cloud just to keep the wheels turning. And as orgs large and small started heavily relying on the like of Teams, Webex and Zoom for internal collaboration, they realized that they could also get their communications from the same place. Better yet they could use Direct Routing to keep their existing physical assets in play for if and when things returned to normal. After all, with so much uncertainty, why throw out what still works?
Now at this point efficiency has improved and the infrastructure for Direct Routing is more settled. But the final, and possibly the largest, hurdle to full-blown global adoption still remained – Complexity.
For a business to build their own Direct Routing solution, they needed their own SBC (and a redundant SBC to act as a failsafe) and they needed the expertise necessary to boot up, configure and maintain a Direct Routing solution. On top of this they needed to commit the resource to keeping up with Microsoft and all the changes that they make on their end. This remained out of reach for even some larger organizations, let alone the SMBs who also needed to communicate with the outside world.
Enter the Direct Routing as a Service (DRaaS) model, which allowed Providers and Carriers to deliver Direct Routing as a part of their UC or voice services. This meant that their customers could have all of the benefits with none of the complexity – A win-win. The fact remained however that these providers still needed to source the expertise and tech stack to keep up with demand and the shifting workspace, all of which were found scattered in different places. For the providers, Direct Routing was still as complex as ever. Hot on the heels of this, Call2Teams was born. Effectively sitting in between the provider and Microsoft Teams, Call2Teams was able to flatten out the jagged edges of Direct Routing and make things a lot easier for the partners that chose to implement it.
With no more barriers for entry, providers were able to freely, and easily offer Direct Routing options, and as more and more businesses moved their users to their preferred UC platform, the partners who had integrated their voice services into these platforms saw massive uptake.
Businesses were able to keep using their existing telephony setups in the cloud, even after returning to the office and the ability to use their existing setups no matter where their employees were helped to shape the hybrid work environment as we know it today. Not only this, but with a Direct Routing setup, businesses can also now lean on the suite of features that Microsoft Teams has developed and have them act as a part of their communications infrastructure.
And as they say, the rest is history. But what does the future have in store for Direct Routing?
Microsoft Teams has now cemented itself as the world’s most popular work app. And the world has shown that its preference is to have everything in one place wherever possible. Because of this, integrated voice has massive potential as more and more businesses move to the cloud and towards their favourite collaboration platforms.
The only real question that remains is which Microsoft Teams Phone option are the masses going to gravitate towards? And this one is slightly trickier to answer. Those who want just the basic calling function, who won’t be looking to scale massively or don’t want to mess around with setups and implementations will always look at Microsoft Calling Plans first, after all that’s who they’re aimed at. But for businesses who want to have any sense of flexibility or ownership over their call control will almost certainly pick either Direct Routing or the up and coming Operator Connect. It’s true that in recent years, these two services have become more and more alike, but Direct Routing remains the only option to bring existing setups to the Microsoft Teams platform – A factor that many businesses consider vital even to this day. Microsoft Teams Phone has positioned itself to cater to all business audiences, with each option having it’s own flavour, and providers are now going to have to decide which flavour they want to deliver in order to give their customers what they want in a way that works for them.
Are you a Provider looking to use Microsoft Teams as an extension of your services? Why not book a demo or get in touch to see how Dstny could help you make that happen?
Last updated: 05/05/2025
